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Monday, January 21, 2013

Teagle F. Bougere and members of the cast of Invisible Man (Photo by Astrid Reiken)

No one has tried to make a movie of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and until now – an adaptation by Oren Jacoby, directed by Christopher
McElroen, is currently playing at Boston’s Huntington Theatre – no
one, to my knowledge, has tried to put it on the stage either. It’s easy to see
why. The staggering 1952 novel is as dense and highly conceptual as a Kafka
story, its tone is satirical and its style is surrealistic. It imagines the
radicalization of a bright, sensitive young black man (the nameless narrator),
who wins a scholarship to a Negro college, as they were then called, by making
a valedictory speech at his high school that enthusiastically promotes
compliance as a means of bettering the position of the black race. The club
that sponsors him is made up of prominent white men who first require him and
other promising young African Americans to box blindfolded for the
entertainment of the membership. At college, he idolizes the president,
Bledsoe, who assigns him the job of chauffeuring an aging white benefactor. At
the request of the curious guest, the narrator takes him off the grounds to a
nearby black neighborhood, with disastrous results. Bledsoe suspends the
narrator, sending him to New York
with letters that he says will recommend him to various white members of the
college’s board for jobs; having earned his fees for the fall, he’ll be allowed
to return to school. The truth, as the narrator learns, is that he’s been
expelled, and the letters are condemnatory. He finds work at a symbolic white
paint factory, but an explosion sends him to the hospital. He rents a room in Harlem, where he observes an eviction that brings out the
orator in him once again. His impromptu speech is so rousing that he finds
himself picked up by socialists who give him a generous salary to make use of
his talents. Their opposite number is a black extremist named Ras the Destroyer
who preaches complete segregation of the races and targets the narrator for his
special disdain. The book is a flashback: when it begins, the narrator has
finally reached the conclusion that as a black man he’s invisible in white
society and that the only way he can live in it (and not be wrecked by it) is
to embrace his invisibility.

Author Ralph Ellison

The novel is one of the signal achievements in
twentieth-century American literature – it may be the greatest American book of
the mid-century – but its tortuous narrative is a catalogue of ideas about
race. It lacks dramatic shape – not a problem for a book but certainly a
challenge for a dramatist. Honestly, I’m not sure how the hell you’d turn it
into a workable play, but Jacoby hasn’t really tried. Invisible Man at
the Huntington
is a Reader’s Theatre version of the classic text. The Invisible Man (played by
a young actor of tremendous stamina, Teagle F. Bougere) is still the narrator,
and he recites massive, unwieldy chunks of Ellison’s prose while around him
nine other earnest performers in a variety of supporting roles reproduce
episode after episode, almost exactly as each appears in the book. Jacoby has
transferred almost every major development onto the stage. (Perhaps the only
significant omission is the one in which the Invisible Man dons shades and is
confused by a number of Harlem residents for a notorious local pimp who is
juggling as many identities simultaneously as the narrator has tried on sequentially.) Clocking in at nearly three hours, including two intermissions, the production is recitation, not dramatization.

Troy Hourie’s clever set grounds the play visually in the basement room where the Invisible Man is squatting, lit up by hundreds of light bulbs – part and parcel of Ellison’s controlling metaphor of light and shadow. (The protagonist has found a way to divert energy from Con Edison’s grid
without having to pay for it: his invisibility allows him, ironically, to live
in a shower of light.) But McElroen’s staging is terribly static; even the set
pieces that you expect to generate a little visceral excitement, like the
boxing match and the eviction scene and the Harlem
riot at the climax, are lame. The production relies on Mary Louise Geiger, the
lighting designer, to create imitation dramatic moments by blazing the lights
to underscore important developments or shift from one episode to another
(which is effective the first time and thereafter a cheap theatrical effect,
not to mention that it’s an assault on the audience). And the actors are stuck;
without dramatic structure or active, motivated staging, all they can do is
indicate – which translates in most cases into mugging. Deidra LaWan
Starnes, as the narrator’s warm-hearted landlady, Mary Rambo, is the most
zealous mugger, though the style Jeremiah Kissel adopts as Brother Jack, the
socialist who spots the Invisible Man’s gifts and invites him into the
movement, is particularly baffling. The most inventive actor is Brian D. Coats,
who plays (among other parts) Peter Wheatstraw, the first person the Invisible
Man makes contact with in Harlem. The most
charismatic is Johnny Lee Davenport, who has a regal presence in his scenes as
Bledsoe but unfortunately has less to do as the play goes on. Paradoxically,
though almost everyone is on stage most of the time, the stultified staging
deprives the production of a real sense of ensemble. I can’t think of a
way to make the novel work on stage, but at the very least the material calls
for a kinetic production. Instead itgets a read-through.

– Steve Vineberg is
Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross
in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review, The Boston
Phoenix and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three
Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please:
Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.